Kevin: “New car is really cool!”

14.03.2012

First collective test of 2012 World Series by
Renault resumed today in Paul Ricard. As expected, laptimes improved further.
Eventual fastest lap 1'45"667, set by Robin Frijns (Fortec) during the
morning session was whole 4.234 seconds better than Robin Wickens’
1'49"901 from last year testing.

Kevin had a busy day with 27 laps in the
morning and 28 in the afternoon but was only ranked as 16th. He improved by more than 1.5 seconds to
1'46"944 but as it is always true during pre-season testing, times don’t
tell the full story.

Kevin: “The new Formula Renault 3.5 car is
really cool, it’s a long step forward. Thoughts were that new car will be 2-3
seconds per lap faster but we already beat the old lap record by more than four
seconds. And it was only the maiden test! New car is faster everywhere – under
acceleration, under braking, in the turns. Only top speed at the end of the
straight is lower because wings are much bigger now. And when you open DRS it
really lets go! It would be interesting to compare our laptimes to GP2 but
unfortunately they are driving different track configuration in Paul Ricard.

Obviously everything was new for everybody,
maybe next time we will get fully to the grips with the new car. I had no major
setbacks during two days of testing. The only minor one was on the closing
stages of the first day. I just went out with fresh tires and then after two
turns red flags were out. There was no point to return to the track and so my
number of laps remained quite modest. But I saved one set of tires for the
second day and today I also managed to save one set for the next test.

Today afternoon team put us on different
settings – Jules had high-downforce configuration, my car was set up into
low-downforce. I was so much faster on straights but lost even more in twisty
sections. My time was only tenth but still encouraging as all drivers in front
of me had high-downforce setting.”

Next collective tests are scheduled to take
place in Barcelona on April 3-4.